Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Drinking your toilet flush …Absolutely! Look at the Future of Potable Water.


Have you ever wondered what happens to the water flushed from your toilet, a shower, or your laundry?

All wastewater flows through your plumbing system into the main sewage collection (a network of pipes buried under the streets) where it is conveyed by gravity to a treatment facility for pollutants removal prior discharge to a body of water (river, lake, ocean, etc.)

At the treatment plant, sewage goes through a series of treatment processes designed to improve the quality of the water. The best available technologies in past allowed for a degree of water quality suitable only for discharge back into nature with the expectation of causing the least hazard to the environment. However in the latest decades, Advanced Water Treatment (AWT) has reached such sophistication that sewage can be transformed to the highest quality of purified drinking water suitable for consumption by the population within few hours after flushing one’s toilet.

Now, you may ask, why would I like to drink “cleaned” sewage? Factors such as population growth, climate change, and scarce water supply are forcing many communities to rethink and diversify their water portfolio. One way to achieve some “water security” is to implement Direct Potable Reuse (DPR – Wastewater treated to highly purified levels) and buffer existing water resources.

What about community acceptance and the “yuck” factor?

Get over it, adopt a broader view of the role water must play in the environment, and think sustainability. Most interesting, our water bodies receives fertilizers, pesticides from agricultural uses, all pollutants washed off in a rain event from urban areas, excrement from all source of warm blooded animals, etc. and this is the water anyhow, after treatment and contaminant removals we all already drink when it reaches our faucets.